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In his student days, Schopenhauer set out to investigate the link between madness and genius.

Speaking to psychiatric patients, he concluded that madness results from repression.

What genius and madness have in common, he thought, is a disrupted relationship with time.

In 1809, the 21-year-old Arthur Schopenhauer matriculated at the University of Göttingen, nominally to study medicine and satisfy his interest in the natural sciences. In Göttingen, the skeptic Gottlob Ernst Schulze introduced him to Plato and Kant. Arthur remarked to Schulze, “Life is a tricky business. I’ve decided to spend it trying to understand it.” With that, he left Göttingen to pursue his studies at the newly founded University of Berlin, which had fast risen into Germany’s premier center of philosophy.

In Berlin, Schopenhauer attended lectures by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the head of the department, and found him to be abstruse and tedious. He thought of Fichte as a charlatan and second-rate Kant, and, in........

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